The rights of authors to their data and thus their right to be mentioned by name when data is reused are valuable assets and are therefore stipulated as part of the principles of the “BonaRes Repository Data Publication Strategy”. The author expects a high visibility (reputation) of the data and a low effort in data curation prior to publication and metadata provision and credits to his/her scientific findings. Data reusers require clear usage rules and user friendly citation (for example in data collections) to avoid an inflated reference list. In this document we provide clear and simple rules how an DOI is provided for various data and how updates and versions are handled.